Have traditional spinning hard drives ever been used in space outside of pressurized crewed areas? Ever beyond LEO?

Question

The Atacama Large Millimeter Array or ALMA is a radio telescope complex where signals from dozens of distributed dishes are routed to a single computer which performs interferometry and image processing computationally.

At about 5 kilometers altitude they are not in space yet, but traditional spinning magnetic hard drives were not used due to the altitude and solid state drives were selected.

The Event Horizon Telescope is a cardboard box flown around the world collecting stacks of hard drives, and okay, an array of radio telescopes, some at very high altitude. This comment links to the Western Digital post What Does Helium Have to Do with the Black Hole Image? where I see that special helium filled and sealed hard drives were used so that they would work reliably at the high altitudes of some of the observatories in the network.

Question: Have traditional spinning hard drives ever been used in space outside of pressurized crewed areas? Ever beyond LEO? I'm excluding things like laptops and other computers used in the pressurized crewed areas of space stations, and would like to focus instead on any use of a spinning disk of magnetic material addressed by a read-write head in any other type of location.

We know that spacecraft including the Voyagers had magnetic tape recorders, and early weather satellites had magnetic video tape recorders, but have spinning hard (or floppy for that matter!) disks of magnetic materials been used outside of pressurized crewed areas?

---

Digital tape recorder (DTR):

• How was magnetic tape decay prevented in Voyager 1?
• Did the designers of Voyager neglect the angular momentum of the tape recorders?
• Does the tape recorder on Voyager-1 still work?
• Voyager 1's tape recorder and other angular momentum management issues
• Voyager 1's tape recorder and other angular momentum management issues
• Hackaday: Interstellar 8-Track: The Not-So-Low-Tech Data Recorders of Voyager

Video recorder:

• How did the TIROS video tape recorders record and playback images rather than audio; how were the signals modulated?
• How were video tape recorders adapted to work in orbit in 1962?

For fun:

• How (the heck) was coherent synthetic aperture radar (SAR) implemented using photographic emulsion aboard Apollo 17? includes photo of a table full of hard drives presumably transported by the Event Horizon Telescope's worldwide network of cardboard boxes

Answer 1

As far as I know, the only HDDs that have ever been used in space (excluding crewed areas) are a pair of Conner Peripherals CP3540 500 MB HDDs on the MSTI-3 mission launched in May 1996. The mission lasted 18 months but did not go beyond low earth orbit. The two drives were mounted in a hermetically sealed enclosure. They were mounted back-to-back to avoid torque on the spacecraft during drive startup. There are a couple of very comprehensive reports from Scott Bussinger on the storage unit, one from 1993 before the mission and one from 1998 after the mission.

This slide is from a presentation at the AVS conference a couple of years ago:

Answer 2

Conventional hard drives cannot be used in the absence of air (or at high altitudes where the air is thin). They rely on a moving layer of air at the surface of the disk that allows the heads to 'fly' quite close to the surface. There are newer drives that are filled with helium and are hermetically sealed, so these can function at altitudes that conventional hard drives cannot tolerate. As an example, Seagate says:

In general, most Seagate and Maxtor-brand drives are designed to work under the following specifications: Operating altitude (max): 3,048 meters (10,000 feet) Nonoperating altitude (max): 12,192 meters (40,000 feet)

A Dell support knowledgebase entry states something similar.

So, to answer your question in the general, no. Because they can not function at altitude or in (even higher altitude) space